The wild success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code
has spawned a thriving cottage industry of both supporters and critics. One of Brown's more controversial assertions is that the emergence of Christian orthodoxy was based not on its merit but on the politics of the winning side. Here, Bock sums up the evangelical perspective as he challenges the idea that orthodoxy "emerged" at all. Rather, he argues, it survived its many challenges in the early centuries of the Christian church because it best reflected the thoughts and teachings of Jesus and the apostles. The author, who teaches New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, considers the idea that Christianity needs to be "reimagined"—reformed in the image of recent archeological and literary discoveries—to be an ill-advised attempt to rewrite history. He takes on those scholars who want to reinterpret Christianity in light of early Gnostic teachings that denied the oneness of the Father and the Son and spiritualized the gospel stories into myths. Bock recognizes this is pretty sophisticated stuff, and offers the reader a helpful chapter outlining times, names and ideas, providing a useful framework for the rest of his book. While not conclusively proving his thesis, Bock does provide a lively and readable survey of competing beliefs in Christianity's earliest days. (Aug. 8)
